Indian Women Increasingly Taking Self Defense Classes to Fight Back (Literally) Against Eve Teasing

by Sarah Menkedick · 2010-07-02 07:04:00 UTC
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Women in India and Bangladesh are consistently harassed, accosted and threatened by the practice of "eve-teasing," a brand of sexual harassment that goes beyond street-side "hey baby" taunting to physical violence and psychological torture.

Eve-teasing is so constant that in New Delhi, India's "rape capital" with more than 500 rapes a year (a number most likely vastly under-reported, due to a culture of silence which prevents women from speaking out against their attackers), there has been a surge in self-defense courses for women.

One state-sponsored self-defense school for women has had 70,000 pupils since it opened in 2002, and numbers are growing. More and more people, both men and women, are offering private classes and/or opening up their own self-defense schools, teaching women how to use everything from traditional scarves to keys to jewelry to fight back at men who attempt to grope, attack, or threaten them.

One teacher encourages women to scream, bite, claw, kick, and generally lash out in whatever way possible; another motivates students with the statement, "It is not the size of the woman in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the woman." Another, a retired army officer who opened a self-defense school after his daughter was harassed by a teacher, says he helps women gain faith in their own physical strength by teaching them how to take down an attacker step-by-step.

All of this is well and good, and after experiencing so much street-side harassment myself in Mexico, I certainly get a surge of angry satisfaction at the thought of a woman smacking down the man that dares attack her. The rise of self-defense classes is an encouraging sign of both awareness of a serious problem and the empowerment of women to fight back and speak out about it, but these classes need to be accompanied by a battle against the issue itself: the belief of South Asian men that they can harass and violate women with impunity and that women's bodies are their property, and the cultural acceptance of these beliefs.

When a man lurches towards a woman to grab her or worse, to attempt to rape her, it is crucial that she have the skills to fight him off. But it would be far better if she didn't have to learn how to take him down with hair clips and keys, if instead, he simply didn't lunge at all.

Photo credit: Gregor_y

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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